Bioshock Cosmos
by Archontruth
Summary: The framework of a Bioshock tale in space inspired by a few largely sleepless days playing Bioshock Infinite. Because once you've got the bottom of the ocean and the top of the sky out of the way, what's left but the final frontier?


**Bioshock Cosmos**

* * *

This is just something I put together after reading some Reddit comments about ideas for the next Bioshock. After underwater and in the sky, Bioshock in space doesn't seem all that farfetched, does it?

I don't own Bioshock or anything related to it. That should be obvious and I'm not sure why stories on this site always seem to start with that, but I guess it makes Legal happy.

Italics below indicate musings on game mechanics.

'John' is a placeholder name. It could be anything, a man or a woman. Yes, I realized that Master Chief is 'John-117'. The name gets used a lot. It's common.

* * *

At the dawn of the era of human space travel, a charismatic socialist ideologue assembles a vast following including many of the brightest minds of the age. Determined to establish a utopia among the stars, he loads his followers onto a fleet of colony ships and disappears beyond the edges of known space.

Years pass and nothing is heard from the expedition. The leader and his flock are eventually dismissed as lost. In the decades that follow human spacefarers discover that the Earth appears to be unique in its capacity to support human life. No other worlds capable of easily supporting life are found, and only exhaustive terraforming has made a few barren rocks remotely habitable, requiring equipment that the lost colonists did not possess.

Almost a century later, starships of unknown origin equipped with fantastic, physics-defying technology appear in orbit above the Earth without warning, launching a devastating attack that is barely fought off. Billions die and whole nations are laid waste. More questions than answers are found amid the wreckage - the attackers are vicious, misshapen mockeries of humanity - but one indisputable fact is discovered: the star charts found on the ships of the invaders show that they hailed from a world settled by the 'Lost' colonists.

In the aftermath many of the survivors of the attack on Earth who had contact with the invaders exhibit inexplicable abilities (telepathy, pyrokinesis, invisibility, and more), the use of which brings on rapid physiological degeneration. Most of the afflicted survivors are placed in cryogenic hibernation while research is done on their condition with the hope of curing it in the future.

John is one of those unlucky afflicted, a police officer wounded in the bombardment and ground attack on Seattle, Washington. John goes to sleep in the hospital surrounded by loved ones and expecting to wake up to a cure. Instead he comes out of hibernation on a military ship that is part of a fleet that has been travelling for years, preparing to assault the Lost colony. It is discovered that a clerical error at the cryogenics facility resulted in John's stasis pod being loaded onto a troop transport instead of the soldier who was supposed to be making the journey.

Return to Earth is impossible for John; no ship can be spared to ferry him. No cure yet exists for John's condition, but while the fleet travelled drugs were developed back on Earth that slow the degeneration and stabilize the unusual powers of the afflicted. The attack fleet was launched before the drugs were developed, so none of the afflicted other than John was brought along, but back on Earth many of the afflicted have been thawed out and weaponized, so the fleet's commanders decide to put John to the same use. Out of options, John reluctantly joins the invasion force, hoping to at least find answers or a cure.

The Lost colony is nothing like anyone expected. It is a lush, verdant garden world that has been fashioned into a perfect socialist utopia. Everyone is happy, the needs of all are met, and poverty, war and discrimination are subjects taught in schools but never experienced. Highly advanced defensive technology stops the assault of Earth's military in orbit, but the Lost don't retaliate or even seem upset. Far from the warped horrors that attacked Earth, these Lost are seeming paragons of physical and mental perfection who welcome their would-be attackers and profess ignorance about the attack on Earth, though their technology is hauntingly similar to that of the ships that attacked Earth.

The generals in charge of the fleet and the governments back on Earth demand answers but cannot find a means to coerce them, and the Lost will only allow one person on the Earth fleet to enter their paradise, a 'wayward link' in the 'Endless Chain' that seems to be the basis of a pseudo-mystical creed that the Lost all share. John alone is invited to set foot on the Lost colony.

Accompanied only by an AI-driven military android that the Lost seem to disregard entirely, John enters the paradise of the Lost. He finds that they all possess abilities similar to his, though their bodies aren't in danger of breaking down and their flesh doesn't distort and boil when they use their gifts.

John discovers almost as soon as he lands that while the Lost world is a paradise, it does not lack for tooth and claw. The alien world's vicious native ecology forced the lost to build in unlikely places. Their cities, defended with walls and energy shields, are buried beneath the polar ice caps and in active volcanoes. Others float in the clouds, hang off of the sides of mile-high cliffs or sit on the bottom of lakes.

_An early mission familiarizes John with some basic Earth weapons and Lost powers as he pitches in to protect the Lost settlement he lands in when its barriers inexplicably fail and the local fauna pours into the settlement. (Instead of EVE or salts, John has a 'humanity gauge' and is limited in the use of his powers by the toll that they take on his body. He can replenish his humanity by shooting up with vials of the suppressive drugs to keep from turning into something completely inhuman. When John gets close to the bottom of the humanity gauge his powers are more potent, but come with a cost – they're less accurate, vision distorts, hands become so warped that he can't hold his gun anymore, etc.)_

When the dust settles, John's android minder prods him to covertly investigate the failure of the Lost technology in hopes that it can be replicated by the Earth military forces in orbit, while the Lost start filling John in on their world and past. The Endless Chain isn't just a new age religion, the Lost really are linked to each other through their technology, and once he stands on their world he starts feeling the connection of the Endless Chain himself. Those Lost whose minds or bodies reject the Endless Chain are called 'broken links' and are exiled from utopia. Suddenly the attack on Earth starts to make sense.

John is a curiosity to the Lost, for he seems to break one of the rules of the Endless Chain: while his body is undeniably 'Broken', his mind remains uncorrupted. Among the Lost the degradation of body and mind go hand in hand.

John doesn't have much time to dwell on this, because the Earth fleet radios in looking for answers as to why Lost settlements seem to be catching fire on the other side of the planet from where John landed. John travels with the Lost through the Endless Chain (which allows physical teleportation to others in the chain) to the affected areas, which are in the midst of an outbreak of the Broken. Before his eyes John watches the Lost of the region turn into the monsters that devastated the Earth.

John's powers are more offensively-oriented than those of the Lost, and he's starting to be drawn into the Endless Chain, so he joins the battle against the broken links on the side of the Lost.

Over the course of containing the outbreak the android learns enough about the Lost defenses to tell the Earth's military how to get past them. Ignoring John's warnings, they launch an all-out attack under orders from Earth to exterminate the Lost to prevent the creation of any more Broken.

With their defenses broken and weakened by the Broken outbreak the Lost are being slaughtered by the soldiers of Earth. John, sickened by the slaughter and tormented by the deaths he can _feel_ through the Endless Chain, turns on his former comrades and fights the Earth military. Bolstered by his growing powers and the support of the Endless Chain, John manages to reactivate powerful, forbidden orbital weapons systems that the Lost had chosen to abandon long ago, and uses them to drive back Earth's fleet.

The activation of those hidden weapons is the signal for a Broken fleet larger than the one that devastated Earth to appear from the void; mindlessly drawn to the weapons John activated, the Broken hunger to claim them for their own. The Broken attack both the Earth fleet and the Lost, engulfing the star system in yet another battle.

Delving deeper into the Endless Chain, John discovers the dark truth of the Broken; they were not an accident. The messianic leaders of the Lost, the disciples of the leader who built their utopia and the creators of the technology that binds together billions of Lost minds into the Endless Chain, created the Broken on purpose and aimed them at the Earth. Their ultimate purpose was to weaken Earth's defenses enough that all of humanity could be drawn into the Endless Chain – and into their grasp.

Left as the only one capable of opposing the masters of the Endless Chain, John must race against time to stop them before his body, mutating out of control due to overuse of his powers and a growing resistance to the suppression drugs, fails. Battling through waves of Broken, he finds unlikely allies among a few of their number who retain their own minds and sanity, and reveal that they created the strain of Broken infection that was used on Earth. Unable to disobey the Endless Chain's orders to attack, they seeded Earth with those who could wrest control of the Chain from its masters in a desperate gambit.

In the end, John descends deep beneath the surface of the Lost world and faces the masters of the Endless Chain, slaying them in the heart of the machine that maintains the Chain.

_John will have opportunities throughout his adventure to form bonds or neglect and shatter them. Among the Lost, the Earth military and even the Broken will be potential allies that John can aid and form ties with, or ignore and walk a lonelier path of self-interest. Those choices will affect what happens in the moment when John stands at the heart of the Endless Chain and takes its power in his hands._

Ending One: The fleets of Earth and the Broken trade blows in orbit. On the surface Lost, earthling and Broken engage in a vicious battle for survival. A blinding light fills the sky, ethereal chains shimmering into being throughout the heavens, and everything… stops. In the heart of the Endless Chain, John stands in the midst of his allies; Lost, free Broken and survivors of the Earth military's ground assault. The Chain winds through all of them, bringing them together and suffusing their souls with light. The Endless Chain becomes the gift for all it was meant to be, a bridge uniting the factions and bringing an end to war.

Ending Two: The Lost, the peaceful exiles who desired to better mankind, wither and die as their world burns; caught between the guns of Earth and the rage of the Broken, betrayed by those who founded their utopia. In the instant that John takes hold of the Endless Chain, it shatters under the weight of his growing madness and inhumanity. The light and hope of the Lost is extinguished, and as one they all become Broken. Earth's fleet is overwhelmed, shattered hulls burning in the void as the Broken sweep away from their dead world in a great wave. John, twisted by rage and countless betrayals, mutated and no longer human, stands on the bridge of the greatest of the Broken warships as a fleet dwarfing the size of the first closes in on Earth. They are driven to unite humanity not in a great Utopia, but a Broken Chain of horror without end.


End file.
